[SwellJoe]

When I recently worked on making our installer work on Mac OS X again (it broke a few years ago, and we don't have a lot of demand for Mac OS X, since we build server software), I did so in a VM on my Linux system. It was slow, it was ornery to get it working, but it was free (if we assume a pirated Mac OS X, though I have a purchased box of a slightly older version than the one I was able to install from a prior Hackintosh experiment that I gave up on, since I found I hate Mac OS X through and through).

I would never build for Mac or iOS if I had to buy a Mac. Since I was able to do so effectively for free, Mac support in our software (which is pretty popular with about 3+ million downloads a year) got a lot better. I didn't enjoy it, and I won't be using that VM for anything other than testing Mac OS X support, but it's silly to act like everyone ought to be willing to shell out money to support a platform (especially in our case, where the vast majority of our paying users are running Linux).

"look at all the junk in the store as it is now. Imagine what it would be like if there wasn't that $100 barrier to entry?"

Whatever happened to the argument that the Apple approval process was to protect users from poor quality software?